INTRODUCTION

Christopher Mitchell

This edition of the International Journal of Peace Studies has largely been
written as a tribute to one of the pioneers of the field of conflict analysis
and resolution, John W. Burton, who is now in retirement in Australia, his native
country. The issue partly pays a tribute to John Burton because of the pioneering
work - both intellectual and practical - that he undertook during the period
between 1960 and 1990, but especially in the "early days" of the development
of the field, when it was struggling to achieve acceptance among dubious academics
and sceptical policy makers. Burton was one of a generation of men and women
- Kenneth and Elise Boulding, Morton Deutsch, Johan Galtung, Anatol Rapoport,
Herbert Kelman, Chadwick Alger - who worked to make the field not only accepted
but rigorous, relevant and challenging. The fact that, currently, there are
over 200 conflict and peace studies programs in United States universities alone,
that Alternative Dispute Resolution is deemed an essential part of any legal
system, and that politicians and journalists routinely use and sometimes understand
the concepts and language of the field, is in no small part due to this initially
small number of scholar-practitioners. Among them Burton played a pre-eminent
role.

The articles in the edition of IJPS are of two types. Some represent recent
unpublished writings by Burton himself, short and pithy but continuing a number
of themes he has written about extensively elsewhere - the links between domestic
politics and external conflict, for example, or the need for systematising innovative
ways of "coping with" conflicts. Other articles are by a number of
Burton's colleagues, who assess some of his varied contributions to the field
of conflict analysis and resolution. David Dunn discusses Burton's contribution
to their parent field of International Relations and the impact of Burton's
ideas on the very conservative British branch of this discipline. Dennis Sandole,
who has worked with Burton on both sides of the Atlantic, traces through some
Burtonian ideas and their impact on his own thinking. Richard Rubenstein takes
up Burton's theory of Basic Human Needs, and comments on the way in which these
ideas have been extended since Burton published his pioneering works in the
1980s and early 1990s. My own piece looks back over thirty years to the beginnings
of problem solving workshops and the manner in which these were developed as
a basic tool of conflict resolution.

Undoubtedly there will be those who will feel that we have left out this or
that important aspect of Burton's work, or that we have wrongly emphasised the
effects of some of his ideas. With a figure like John Burton, however, it is
difficult to do full justice to the range of issues he has taken up and discussed,
or the contribution he has made to this or that line of thought. However, we
hope there is enough here to provide some flavour of Burton's work, of the impact
he has had on the development of our field and of that field's intellectual
and practical debt to him.